The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters (38 page)

Chapter 34

We almost didn’t take him seriously, the man with the shadowed jaw, reeking of cheap pomade, who turned up on a day when the first sharp wind of autumn was stripping the trees of Fitzwilliam Square. He had a leather briefcase and breath to inebriate or kill you. We were distracted, about to depart on a short tour of England with the new Pertilly and furiously rehearsing.

He told Pudel he was a journalist, come to puff our next show. She’d believed him.

‘Yarvel,’ she must have told him, ‘Komm in.’

She ushered him into the green parlour so he might gaze at the retouched portrait of the Swiney Godivas while he waited. The paint had dried on the new Pertilly’s face.

Even I would have done the same with the man, suspecting little. Such a call was not unusual. We bestowed rehearsed, formulaic interviews frequently. The Brotherhood of the Hair had lately expanded from the arts into the sciences. We’d had several bespectacled gentlemen come to study us. A Doctor Samuel had deployed our example in a learned article to explain why men could not vie with women in the production of hair. He elaborated on three theories: that the manufacture of manly beards extracted all the necessary hair-producing materials from the blood; that the intellectual labours of men disadvantaged them in the production of hair; that women’s scalps were fattier, rendering the integument more agreeable to hair follicles. And he developed a theory of ‘conjugal selection’, explaining that bald or skimpily tressed women rarely found husbands to breed with (Annora being the exception that proved the rule) and so the long-haired subspecies prevailed. He added the surprising statistic that flaxen-haired women were at a slight discount on the matrimonial market. ‘Poets have a preference for fair hair; no poem is complete without a flaxen-haired maid, but prosaic mortals in search of an actual wife seem, upon the whole, to prefer the brown or the black.’

Oona had flinched when Tristan murmured, ‘Fascinating!’

Pudel climbed up to the music room to tell us of our latest inquisitive visitor. She handed over his card, which was poorly printed on cheap paper and smelled of a saloon bar.

‘A newsman in the best parlour? The class of man you’d not want to meet in an alley! What is wrong with the hall? Or the front step? What is he at now?’ demanded Darcy. ‘Did you leave him loose among the silver, Pudel? Manticory, this one’s for you.’

I was dispatched to give him a few brisk words and some photographs.

But when I entered the parlour, it was as if the air had been removed from the room. He was of no great stature, Mr Millwillis, with undistinguished features. I supposed him about forty years of age. The eyes on him were small and blue, vitreous as any doll’s. He was the kind of man who instantly made you feel a poor kind of a thing. This was perhaps the intended result of his air of quiet yet penetrating and contagious cynicism, which assassinated every pleasant sentiment in the near vicinity. Before he’d uttered a word, I knew that the man was a black breaker of spells, a squelcher of dreams.

‘Manticory Swiney, the redhead!’ he said. ‘St John Millwillis.’

Outside, the wind rifled and shook the trees, battering the roseate bricks of Number 1 Pembroke Street. The house felt barely safe. His lips parted and tugged upwards, showing grey-green teeth. He spoke confidentially. ‘It was not in fact quite right, what I said to your maid. I am a newsman to my toenails, but I have conceived the idea of writing a book, and its heroines are to be none other than yourselves. And your hair. I thought you’d like to know. I’ve already done’ – he laughed at ‘done’ – ‘the Baboon Lady Julia Pastrana, the ugliest woman in the world on account of her hair, where hair should not have been, and coarse as wire, so it was like a swarming of private hair all over her public body. And yes, my book was a great success with the public, the public that is so moral and backward that it likes to show its own hair only in private!’ He grinned. ‘Now you Swineys have hair where it should be, but nothing else is quite – shall we say? – in order. A little digging has uncovered some things so dark you need to strike matches to see them. And
that’s
just what I’ve been looking for in my advancing years – a story that will last longer than a column of newsprint.’

He paused for effusions and confusion on my part. Clearly, he was one of those men who believed my hair the most intelligent part of me. He thought that this gambit would frighten any silly Swiney Godiva into a useful revelation. The pause stretched uncomfortably and the grin tightened on his face. I was too afraid to say what I was thinking: that the Swiney Godivas were worth three Bibles in stories, but there were precious few we’d like aired, and none by his hand, on which the nails were bitten and black.

‘Did you get the hang of what I’m saying there?’ he rapped. ‘Gaping at me like a cow who wouldn’t know a farmer from a bull? I’m going to put you Swineys in a book.’

Words swam into my mouth. ‘I must fetch my sister Darcy to meet you. Pray excuse me.’

His mocking tone followed me out of the room. ‘Darcy Swiney? I thought Tristan Stoker and Augustus Rainfleury were the brains of the Swiney operation. Is it not they who direct the Corporation, and harvest all the profits from your hair, passing the money through the filter of their own pockets before you dumb girlies see a sixpence?’

I turned on my heel and marched back in. ‘No, it is not like that. Someone has been keeping you going with lies. The Swiney Godiva Corporation is our affair. Mr Rainfleury and Mr Stoker are our respected colleagues, our
accessories
in business. And of course, Mr Rainfleury is
family
.’

How I hated to say that last.

Mr Millwillis grinned as if I had offered him not just a bottle of poteen but a whole still. ‘Indeed,’ said he. ‘Mr Rainfleury is the consummate family man. I’ve heard how devoted he is to his Swiney girls. How he’s thinning on top from wearing his head out on the bedstead with them. Well, it’s one way to keep you hairy nymphs under control, I suppose.’

I retorted, ‘Mr Rainfleury acts under our direction in all things.’

I do not know how that lie failed to scorch my teeth while passing through them. Mr Millwillis, meanwhile, pointed his dirty finger at me.

‘Is it one of those New Women you are, then – aping the female savages of Africa with bits of stick and bone in your puffed-up hair? Reverting to primitive times with your monkey screeches for power! Or should I say that you don’t need men, as you have grown your own huge snakes from your head to make up for what a man normally, shall we say,
supplies
.’

‘I am not. We are not,’ I said with an attempt at mildness. ‘No snakes. And no monkeys. No bones. No sticks.’

‘Well,
you
personally don’t need them, do you? You know what they say about redheads, Miss Manticory?’

I did. So this was the direction he’d be taking. He’d be using our hair against us, feeding his public a savoury combination of old cliché with new imagery. It was a sensation like meeting my doll again, to glimpse Millwillis’s ‘Miss Manticory’. But the newsman would be selling a quite different version of me, while cleverly trading on the fame of my doll. Her sweetness would be revealed as corrupt. Her hair – I suddenly realised – would likely be unmasked as a traded human artefact. Her passivity would be exposed as a cover for her raging redhead lusts. I would be Lydia Gwilted and Lizzie Siddaled by someone less scrupled even than Mr Rainfleury and Tristan.

Who could protect me? Mr Rainfleury and Tristan? And Alexander, would he revert to the man of disapproving ice?

I nodded to the journalist. ‘Pray excuse me. I shall be back presently. With Darcy.’

‘Dark devilish Darcy,’ he grinned. ‘The Medusa who ejaculates poison from her snaky hair, not to mention her hot black mouth. Dark Darcy Swiney. The Cruellest Sister.’

I followed Darcy into the parlour as the camp followers must have entered villages in the wake of massacring the Roman legions. She was already demolishing Millwillis even as she trod the first Turkey rug. By the time she was jabbing his chest, she had summed up his idiocy and arrogance with remarkable succinctness. She concluded, ‘So you can quench that ridiculous book idea straight away.’

The terrifying thing was that Millwillis remained quite calm. I’d never seen a man face off Darcy before. In fact, if anything, he seemed rather gratified at her rage. I realised with a cold pang that this was because it was exactly what he wanted – bullying drama, intemperance and verbal violence. Of what else are chapters about raven-haired Medusas made?

When Darcy finally took a breath, he said smugly, ‘Well, it’s of course refreshing to hear your point of view, and who could not revel in its robustness? To twist
the screw of pleasure
, so to speak, even tighter, you’re everything I thought you’d be. Satisfying, indeed! But the fact is that there is nothing you can do to stop me. I don’t even need your cooperation. I already have my title,
The Breastbone Harp
, and three different publishers agog for a glimpse of the manuscript.’

The full horror of the situation finally reached into Darcy’s mind. Her wild eyes fell on me. She declared quickly, ‘Well, you would be wasting your time because Manticory here is our resident writer, and she has
already finished
our genuine biography,
The Swiney Godivas, by one of their number! Intimate confidences and secrets revealed! Illustrated with private family pictures never before seen by the public!
Your sordid second-hand production shall wither in its shadow. And of course, our stage performances will combine with book sales most agreeably, as people always like to invest in a little something to take away with them, we find, after enjoying the
authentic
item, on the stage. Your offering, I assure you, shall not have these advantages. Who wants to read stories from a tainted source when they can have the truth from one of the Swiney Godivas herself ? Beautifully written, too. Not some hack’s scribbles! Manticory has been trained by a poet and writes like an angel.’

She shouldn’t have said that. Until that moment, I had, with care, been able to keep the stupefied wonder from my face. But a compliment to me from Darcy – and such a compliment – caused my features to crash into one another as if passed through a mangle. And Mr Millwillis caught it all. He put on his hat and walked to the door, his face a wall but his shoulders shaking slightly with what must have been mirth. With his hand on the doorknob, he composed himself and turned back to address me.

‘I shall race you to the publishers then, Miss Manticory. May the best man win. You may have
already finished
your magnificent tome, but I am far advanced in my research with a second draft already at the polishing stage.’

‘Fiddle!’ spluttered Darcy.

In answer, Mr Millwillis balanced on one leg, held his case up on his knee, opened it and pulled out a sheaf of typewritten papers, thick as a loaf. I thought,
There must be five hundred pages there of all the ills he’s laying up for us
.

And I thought,
Does this man know of Pertilly’s lost hair and Phelan Swiney, Mariner, and the dusty answers he’s been given? Of my own dalliance with a married man? Of the
palazzo
in Venice, even?

Darcy had no experience of a situation in which her foe was not at her mercy. Only the Eileen O’Reilly had ever presented a threat to her, and the butcher’s runt too had been thoroughly vanquished.

‘Oh put it away, you silly man!’ She snapped her fingers at Millwillis and his sheaf. ‘See him out, Manticory. And check the silver candlesticks and grape scissors first.’

She swept away up the stairs with her nose in the air.

He called out, ‘I’d send your groom out with a brown envelope to lay a wager on my book coming out first.’

Darcy stopped short, visibly shaking. Then she continued up the stairs. Enda, Pertilly and Oona were peering through the banisters, vainly trying to see the man who’d uttered those words.

‘Back to the music room!’ shrieked Darcy.

At the street door, I attempted severity and authority with the journalist. ‘You’d better not be doing it.’

I was no match for him. He was far beyond me in menace.

‘I’d
better not be doing it
? Because it is Darcy Swiney ordered it, so it is not to be interfered with, at the risk of having my scrotum halved?’

Millwillis was his full self now. He was bullying me with everything inside him, the annihilating power of his cynicism, the force of his vulgarity. He was treating me as he would any bastard girl who grew up in shameful want and ignorance in Harristown.

‘Why did you come here,’ I asked, ‘if you did not mean to negotiate with us?’

‘Because in your foolishness, you let me into your lives, and now I can describe three of you from the life, and you can never deny that I saw you with my own eyes and heard you with my own ears.’

‘Even if you lie about what you saw and heard?’

‘Even so. Now hadn’t you
better be
hurrying to your desk now, Miss Manticory, to put the final touches on those gilded pages of yours?’

A tumble of leaves wove around his departing feet, their colours disintegrating into rushing dust.